Anyone who thinks scanning cannot be done conveniently on Linux is mistaken!
Today my wife wanted to scan a job application. At first I was inclined to boot up Windows.
But then I thought, why not give Linux a chance at scanning? To my surprise, my scanner (Canon LIDE 25) was detected immediately via USB 2.0.
So I quickly opened Gimp... Then I launched XSane via "File -> Acquire -> XSane -> Device dialog." And just like that, you can scan almost without a hitch. Almost, because the resolution defaults to a rather low 50 DPI.
On the second scan (at a resolution of 300 DPI), the application scanned perfectly.
Then just save it as Postscript (file extension .ps) and convert it into a nice PDF file from the console using ps2pdf. Voilà!